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08 September 2012 10:28 PM

HAVING been away from work last week, I took a somewhat detached view of events such as the ‘historic’ plan by the European Central Bank to buy unlimited quantities of the bonds issued by troubled members of the eurozone. The reaction to the so-called bazooka reminded me of a recent spoof story in Private Eye which reports that markets have jumped for joy at the last bazillion gazilion eurozone bailout package, with a stop-press item at the bottom adding that markets have crashed on realising said bailout is a dud. The single currency increasingly resembles an ill-fated experiment in communal living from about 40 years ago; everything is going wrong but nobody can bring themselves to admit that their high ideals are not working out on the ground and that the grey verities of ‘square’ society may have something going for them after all.

1) Only a game(s)?

LONDON 2012 winds up this weekend. Some of us, while pleased for the competitors and the spectators, would still rather the whole thing had never happened, not least because much of our ‘fantastic medal performance’ was funded by poorly educated people spending money they cannot afford on buying sheaves of lottery tickets the numbers of which will not come up. On the subject of medals, since when was the m-word a verb? The other day on the radio I heard words to the effect that: ‘Having failed to medal in Beijing, I am delighted to have medalled in London.

2) Time for a spot of revision

BILL Clinton’s starring role in the Democratic Party convention made me realise that it is almost certainly too late to get away a book suggesting the Comeback Kid was a great president. Why? Because somebody else is almost certainly working on it, assuming such a work has not already hit the bookshops. The case for? He balanced the budget, pulled the economy out of recession and kept it there, saw a fall in crime and fired the odd rocket at America’s enemies without getting involved in large-scale open-ended ground invasions. Do I think this makes him a great president? It doesn’t matter. The point is that the case can be made and that making such a case helps to put one’s name about. Revisionism is the name of the game. Actually, I don’t feel qualified to write about American politics. In the only one of our four books to have a specifically American edition with different chapters for the US market, Larry Elliott and did well enough but were careful to stick to economic topics in the main. Staying one jump ahead in this revisionism business, I think instead it is time to rough out a David Cameron retrospective, painting him as a tragic figure who could have achieved so much but whom fate had dealt a terrible hand. But, you object, he is still in office. Quite. As I say, you can’t start too early in the revision racket.

3) Not King Coal.

MY wife and children were in Ireland this summer. So was I, briefly. Imagine my concern at seeing a sign outside a shop in rural County Limerick advertising Polish coal at 17 euros for 40 kilos and British coal at 13 euros. For your information, 40 kilos is about 80 per cent of a hundredweight, while the euro is…who knows? The main point is I was brought up to believe east European coal was rubbishy brown stuff, deeply inferior to our own crisp black carbon matter. So what’s going on?

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan